


paper cuts

by gly13



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Blasphemy, God Complex, Implied Murder, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Non-Linear Narrative, Power Dynamics, Small Towns, sin - Freeform, the Jeeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:35:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26075779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gly13/pseuds/gly13
Summary: A god-forsaken land is just begging for someone to worship. And Jaemin is more than willing to fill those shoes.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Na Jaemin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24
Collections: nahyuck fic fest!





	paper cuts

**Author's Note:**

> cw // lots of mentions of blood and implied murder
> 
> this was written for nahyuck fic fest (prompt number 100) so big big thanks to mod for all their hard work!! and to my prompter for this prompt i really had a lot of fun and hope you like it <333
> 
> um i don't have a playlist but would recommend just listening to hozier's entire discography and also wonderland by taylor swift as you read this?
> 
> enjoy <33

Shallow footprints in dusty mud. Regular beats as the imprints are made. _Thud. Thud. Thud._ _Thud._ Slow and easy.

Jaemin has never revelled in haste, not in the entire time Donghyuck has known him. Only the drawn-out lethargy of a doleful, whispered hymn. Barely-there touches as fingertips graze up the side of a torso. A  rallentando as a piece of music comes to a close and the final notes trickle out of the piano.

Jaemin has never enjoyed an easy victory, a quick win. Jaemin has always been in it for the long game.

Donghyuck wonders if that’s what his life is to Jaemin: the long game.

He can’t tell if he wants that.

___

The church in the town is Catholic. Built by the direct ancestors of the current inhabitants. An organ that aches with each press of a finger on a key. Creaky wooden pews and torn pages of hymn books. Catholic and empty.

The church built as more of a façade than a building. Catholicism like a mask the whole town wears. Shrouded in fake faith and rehearsed Bible passages. To pretend they are faithful and devoted.

It stands a little away from the rest of the town, like it was intended to be a looming presence: strong in its solidarity, ardent in its isolation. That’s lost now. And the building and all it represents seem distant, irrelevant. Dulling power, dwindling faith. And the lake ‒ the promise ‒ of fire and brimstone seem to edge closer and closer. Like the town might just drown in it.

And if they still bothered to use the confessional they would admit that they are not. That they have fallen out of love with the man in the sky and been sucked into the charming, toothy smile of the boy they grew up with but always knew was something greater. Because he knew it himself.

___

A neon sign hanging loose from wires. Still turned on, still piercing. Swinging back and forth.

A misty afterglow trailing after it, messy waves of fluorescent colour cloudy in the dark night. Like a halo around a particularly deranged angel, it stains the night sky, ripping through the peace of a quiet town on the brink of dawn and tarnishes it, out of place and poignant. Iridescent. Beautiful.

The door to the gas station swings open again and Jaemin comes out.

The neon glow seems to shift to hang about his head, haunting his features. Or maybe Donghyuck’s eyes are just irreparably damaged.

Jaemin is grinning ‒ he so often is ‒ and there are glass bottles clutched in one of his hands. They bend the lights into phantom, pulsating shapes that hang in the stale air, electrifying it. His other hand waves a dollar bill in Donghyuck’s face. It’s the same dollar bill he’d walked into the store with. Showing off. Donghyuck doesn’t want to look at the cashier through the window so he doesn’t.

Instead, he links his arm with Jaemin’s. Jaemin’s breath is hot against his ear when he leans in.

“Ready, babe?”

___

Jaemin is, perhaps, the textbook definition of a big fish in a small pond.

A great white shark pushing his way through the previously peaceful waters of a garden puddle, through the smaller fish that hide beneath rocks and cower in the shadows. That watch with wide eyes and gaping mouths as the shark sinks his already bloodied teeth into the flesh of yet another helpless fish.

The difference, though, is that where others might be tempted to test their power elsewhere, Jaemin revels in it. He excites in it. He has cultured his hunting ground, trained it into a town waiting for his next move with awed, baited, broken breath. Knows each soul and feels the dirt of every road like an itch in his own bones. 

And he loves it. To be human is to love. Donghyuck wonders if that’s a sign.

___

They walk to the church. 

A statue of an angel. Hands meeting as though in prayer, stone wings breathing imitation feathers. Soft to look at, hard to the touch. Graffiti. Vandalised. Ruined. Ridiculed. Black paint sprayed over closed eyes. Mercy. 

Worn cushions. Thread-bare and flat. Wonky gravestones visible through cracked stained-glass windows, like ice splitting under pressure. Jagged rocks embedded in the earth. Moulding cloths draped over broken tables. 

They don’t stay for long. Just enough time for Jaemin to gaze over the dying church and revel in it.

Jaemin pulls the knife from his pocket the second they leave the threshold.

___

To be human is to die powerless, alone, and pitiful. Jaemin thinks it’s quaint, cute. When Jaemin calls Donghyuck cute, Donghyuck hopes it isn’t because he’s yet another toy that Jaemin likes to play with: powerless, alone, and pitiful. Donghyuck hopes he’s special.

He doesn’t pray for it though. He’s afraid that if he does that, Jaemin will hear.

___

The only thing they have to guide them on their walk to the woods is the lighter Donghyuck brought with him and their inbred knowledge of this small town that could carry them anywhere in it with their eyes closed. He only has to try once to get it lit. 

Jaemin keeps his knife out as they walk. It’s a beautiful thing, all delicate and rustic, a weighted comfort in his hands. Nothing fancy.

The knife catches the light, captures it, cradles it, keeps it safe. A beacon in the dark throes of night that surround it. Shining metals and bright flames.

Jaemin thinks it’s funny that these carriers of death are marked by light. He thinks it’s ironic that humans have twisted in that way. He thinks, perhaps, it means that they are begging for death subconsciously. And what kind of god would he be to deny his people their wishes?

___

Jaemin runs a fingertip down the edge of a playing card. The side Donghyuck can see is just nonsensical red and white patterns. Trippy. Psychedelic. An optical illusion of sorts. The boat tunnel in the chocolate factory. Donghyuck’s been staring at it for too long. But it’s hard to pull eyes away from Jaemin when everything he does demands attention. Jaemin slides the card back into the deck.

___

They stop at the edge of the wood: the make-shift barrier between civilisation and primality.

Donghyuck knows better than to ask questions. Most of the time, he isn’t interested in the answer anyhow. Knows better than to ask who she is, where she came from. Why her.

___

Jaemin spreads the deck on the table, fans the cards out so they form a smooth arch. Facedown. There’s a tilted grin on his face, a lopsided glee lurking in his eyes. Slender fingers drumming against the tablecloth and his other hand propping his chin up, forefinger tapping at his own cheek. Boredom picturised. But Donghyuck knows better. 

Donghyuck knows Jaemin better than any soul alive or dead or otherwise. And that is still so very frighteningly little. He knows Jaemin’s habits by heart, reads his feelings with a glance but his thoughts remain an enigma. It excites Donghyuck, how he’ll never quite  _ know. _

The café is silent and vacant of all life besides them. Slanted shelves housing tins of loose tea leaves, spindly wooden legs of tables and chairs. Copper air bubbles in green tea. Windows warping reflections like mirrors in a fun-house. Thick, heavy emptiness.

Jaemin deals cards the same way he plays piano, the same way he plays people, the same way he threads needles, the same way he pulls on puppet strings. With precision, with elegance, with poise. With ease.

Donghyuck picks a card and holds it against his chest. Jaemin’s a showman at heart; delights in the presentation as well as the act itself. The least Donghyuck can do is indulge him, play along.

___

A coil of wire. White-hot. Tight. The fractured end digging into flesh; the pad of an index finger. Poised like a snake hidden beneath blades of grass. Widening eyes reflect; grins split faces. Red marks on skin. Coiled tight. Tighter. A flame flickering: fickle. Toys left at the bottom of the garden, overgrown with weeds. Bodies left in shallow graves, overgrown with dirt.

___

Hollow promises drip from Jaemin’s tongue like poison. Donghyuck swallows them, balances them on the tip of his tongue, excites in the burn.

Clear venom sinking through skin and into his bloodstream as Jaemin drags his teeth over his earlobe. Pointed. Fangs. Jaemin digs into the flesh.

His hands are somehow everywhere at once: running up Donghyuck’s spine, running down his chest, searing into his thighs, pressed tight over his jeans, wrapping strands of his hair around his fingers. Pulling. Pushing. Everything in between.

And the intoxication grows as Jaemin finally detaches his teeth from his ear and digs them into his bottom lip. Donghyuck hisses, tries to bite back. Blood and saliva on the tip of his tongue. As if he’s run it over the edge of a blade. Exhilarating. Metallic like paint coating his tongue and lining his teeth. Mouths move in tandem, teeth clashing. Bone on bone. Click clack. 

It is selfish and it is hellish and it is so so much fun. Donghyuck grins against Jaemin’s mouth and it grows when Jaemin scowls at the feeling. Jaemin presses in harder then, and the taste of blood becomes overwhelming. Jaemin’s hand moves and Donghyuck finally pinpoints its position to a single place when Jaemin pushes bruises into the underside of his jaw, forcing his mouth slack and gaping, 

Donghyuck lets him; he always does.

___

Ungloved hands. Exposed fingertips. Fingerprints like a signature, a brand on each limb touched. An artist’s tag. Hiding from the spotlight of police torches isn’t in Jaemin’s nature.

___

Donghyuck doesn’t know who he is outside of or beyond Jaemin. Donghyuck and Jaemin. Jaemin and Donghyuck.

Jagged fragments of identity stitched together with dental floss.

It feels like it should be dangerous, to give one person so much power over you. It feels like it should be terrifying, for one person’s opinion to be the only one that matters, for someone’s paradox of a thought process to have that much influence over each of your actions, to offer your entire self over to one singular being. It should be, but it’s not. It’s not ‒ it can’t be ‒ because it’s all Donghyuck’s ever known. Him and Jaemin. Jaemin and him. Desire and death. Crimson and clover. Push and pull. Jaemin is powerful in an overwhelming way but Donghyuck is powerful, too.

After all, where would a god be if no one believed in him. 

___

It doesn’t feel like a crime when Jaemin wants to do it. Because Jaemin is so in control, so sure of himself, so determined that he is above such trivial things as laws that it feels so casual and easy ‒ no different than tying your shoe or tying a noose. Flippant.

___

“All gods are man-made,” he says.

___

At the altar of their sins, Donghyuck feels like professing his love. Like throwing the words to the harrowing winds and letting them carry into Jaemin’s ears. Like confession at the shrine to the new world to which Jaemin has introduced him.

He doesn’t.

___

Jaemin is pulling the petals and buds of roses from their stems. Sitting on lush grass that will be dead in a week, the sun at its peak in the sky. Skin gloriously golden, glowing.

His fist closes itself around the head of a flower and pulls. It’s easy, methodical. Like a toddler pulling the head off a Barbie doll. He’s left with thorn-filled stems. A pile of them. His hands are red and bloody but he doesn’t seem to care. Maybe he just can’t feel the pain. Maybe he likes it.

He weaves them together, forces them into something vaguely circular, fiercely determined. Eyes dark with concentration.

“You want to be a king, don’t you?” Jaemin finally looks up at him, and Donghyuck finds himself wishing he hadn’t. He sounds like he’s speaking to a child. Jaemin places the crown of thorns on Donghyuck’s head and his smirk widens when he sees it dig into his scalp. He puts a finger on Donghyuck’s lips. It burns. “But even a king must bow to a god.”

___

A broken compass spinning round and round and round. Like a dagger in Jaemin’s hands. Misdirection. Death. 

___

Like this, an apocalypse seems inevitable. Like the world is teetering on the edge of a table, swaying, and rocking, and tilting but just not quite falling.

“The end of the world is nigh!” Fire and brimstone preachers preach into unhearing ears. “Repent your sins!” They cry into an uncaring world. For fire and brimstone and the promised wrath of God can be terrifying but humans are far more concerned with the fire and brimstone of the present, in which they currently live. 

They are far more scared of a god that can walk behind them and breathe down their neck and press a knife to their throat than any man in the sky: invisible and therefore unreal. Out of sight out of mind. Jaemin likes to remain very much in sight.

He is in the yearbooks in your home and in the booth opposite you at the diner. He is in your nightmares and he is sitting ten feet away in the park. He is your follower on Twitter and he is at the front of your classroom giving a presentation on Macbeth.

And you watch.

Like the world on the edge of the table: everyone watching it sway, holding their breath and releasing it as a sigh once more when it kilters back onto the table, only to hold it once more. And the world is always like this. Perpetual. Holding onto the balance. And Jaemin does not think he will ever grow tired of it.

___

“There,” Jaemin sits back on his ankles and admires his handiwork. “Just like little paper cuts.”

___

Messy and confused. Turning the dial on an old TV and getting nothing but static. Static. The dial clicks as it’s turned. Static again. Fuzzy. Nebulous. 

___

Gas fire at night. Blue, then orange with no border. The smell ‒ tangy on the tongue, hot in the mouth. Carbon monoxide dancing down your throat. The silent killer. Fire. Captures your attention, steals it away. You marvel and you ache to touch. Drips. Trails of gasoline. Drip, drip, drop. Puddles into pools. Drip. Lakes into oceans. Drip. Water into fire. Burn.

___

City fire escapes. Metal and rusty. Grids with rectangles so big you worry you could fall through them. Exposed and open, leading right inside.

Jaemin has never been one for being in a place so big, so busy, as the heart of the city but he likes it here. In the back alleys that lead everywhere, directly into homes from the floors of dirty streets, stained with piss and spilt beer. Empty bottles splintering, shards of glass decorations on the bumpy ground. Hidden, secluded.

What Jaemin loves most about night in a small town is perpetual here. The same dangerous, thrumming atmosphere during the day as there is in the hours so small they scarcely exist. The buildings build shadows into the fabric of the landscape and so people live their lives in darkness in these alleys alongside the rats. 

Donghyuck watches, amused. It’s rare to see Jaemin in such awe, such child-like wonder in his eyes as he runs a blade against the metal of the fire escape on which they sit and the ear-splitting shriek it makes mixes in with the other noises of the city. There’s nothing of the silent night of suburbia. Nothing of the small-town police officers for whom a murder is so exciting, so rare in the overflow of lawn disputes and missing footballs. 

Where a missing person is merely just another file thrown on a desk and forgotten about, not a widespread mystery the entire town is desperate to sink their teeth into and solve. Nothing of the long game is needed here, of the fear trickled down over years until it is bred into each person until they are like cattle hoping it is not their day to die. None of that here. Here, there is a different type of freedom. Where the victims don’t know his power and the people after him don’t know his name. There is movement from inside and Donghyuck knows Jaemin catches it.

It’s nice to know the power of a god is not confined to their shrine. 

___

Jaemin crouches, eyes reverent and far away but impossibly focused. Donghyuck focuses on him, instead.

Ash tracing around his eye, framing it like a gentle caress of destruction. Cinders like eyeshadow, stroking his eyelid. An orange tint to his cheeks: fire like blusher as it bathes his skin.

Perfect design theory. It’s no wonder Donghyuck’s a believer.

___

Moving figures in the crowd aside like a hand bursting through the underside of a coffin lid and then pushing its way through the dirt above it.

___

Baptism in the most impure of ways. Bathed in sticky sweat and dangerous ideas. A leaking fountain pen on the bottom line of a death warrant, twisting bleeding ink into a signature: definite and final. Surrender.

___

Static again. Error. Click. Error. Error.

___

A porcelain doll, cracked across the side of its face. Fragments of chipped white on the ground, and it seems wrong ‒ unsettling ‒ that there is no blood. The doll looks so real, so lifeless and abandoned that it is disturbing that it does not mimic entirely accurately.

___

Spider webs into puppet strings. Fine. Barely-visible. Impossibly strong. Curtains wide open, stage wings open for viewing. No smoke and mirrors needed when the spectacle is just as stunning when the audience can see the pyrotechnics and the man making them happen. It doesn’t lose its charm. Donghyuck doesn’t think Jaemin ever could.

  
  


___

Roaring flames. Hellfire unleashed. Chaotic whips of orange and red lapping up the pools of gasoline and breathing them out again into suffocating collisions of heat.

“Isn’t she pretty?”

___

There are times Jaemin is desperate.

Times when his power feels like a phantom and Jaemin himself feels like an impersonator. Where it feels like the curtains are not just pulled back, but torn from the rafters altogether. And puppet strings are exposed and the puppets themselves seem lifeless and not at all intimidating now that the mystery has been revealed.

A void is never quite so scary when the light turns on and the monster under your bed is just a pile of clothes.

It’s a little sick to admit it. But prolonged exposure to Jaemin will do it, Donghyuck thinks. Because those are the moments Donghyuck likes the best. When Jaemin is distressed and reckless in his craving to be known and loved and worshipped. Donghyuck knows he always has a certain power over Jaemin, but it is these times he feels it the most.

The world feels like it’s flipped, standing on its head as Donghyuck threads his fingers through the hair above Jaemin’s neck and pulls Jaemin’s head closer to his own. “Prove to me you’re worth my time,” he whispers in Jaemin’s ear. It’s harsh. All command pushed out into vocal shivers.

And Jaemin does; he never disappoints.

___

An earring sits on Jaemin’s windowsill like a shiny paperweight. A souvenir. Joining the collection like a late-comer to a party.

___

Push and pull. Push and pull. Magnets constantly rotating, out of sync. Never sure when they’ll attract, when they’ll repel. Keeping Donghyuck on the edge of his seat; on the edge of a cliff. Just needs one last. Push.

___

Jaemin chuckles. It sounds genuine. 

It’s hard to hear him over the crackle of the fire. “People are so desperate to believe in god. They spend their lives wondering, wanting to know the truth. They call themselves agnostic because  _ there might be a possibility _ .” He’s laughing harder now. “But never for once do they stop to think that maybe god doesn’t believe in them. That they don’t deserve that. That they’ve all damned themselves.”

___

Donghyuck wonders if Jaemin keeps him around because he fights back. Because he doesn’t cower and tremble in his presence. Because as much as Jaemin claims to love complete submission, he also loves when someone gives him a fight. And Donghyuck has always loved to fight.

___

Jaemin laughs. And he laughs and he laughs and he doesn’t stop. It’s deranged. 

___

Dominoes. One into the next into the next into the next. On and on and on. Is Donghyuck the one who pushes them at Jaemin’s command? Or is he just the first in line?

___

And soft sunlight seeping in through the cracks of dawn becomes violent, sharp. It is the delicate edge of a blade: fine and exact. It is melting into the dirt of the earth, tinging it orange and yellow ‒ tinging the darkness with life.

Sunlight breathes into the dormancy of dawn and prises its jaw open with bony, calloused fingers.

Utopic in the way Wonderland once was. Untouched like the first snow of Winter. A blanket of white, peaceful and serene. Suburbia is a dreamland. It must be. It has to be.

___

Jaemin smiles. Sweet and kind. There’s blood in his teeth and madness in his eyes. His pupil has swallowed his eye; the thing is nearly pitch black. There’s something else there which Donghyuck isn’t so quick to label.

Jaemin presses himself close and presses chapped lips to Donghyuck’s cheek.

He whispers something but Donghyuck can’t tell what the words are. It’s fine. He thinks he knows.

___

They stand side by side and watch the fire bleed into the sunrise. One singular, indiscernible mess of light. 

Jaemin’s hand curls around his, and Donghyuck feels the sharp edge of the knife press against his palm.

And he revels in the knowledge that the other side is pressing into Jaemin’s in just the same way. That drops of scarlet will mix together in the chalice of their hands until they cannot tell which is which. It’s intoxicating: the thought that Jaemin wants to be close to him in such a way.

Jaemin turns to him, looks away from the fire, though Donghyuck can still see it in his eyes.

A smile stretches across his face, slow and genuine.

Jaemin has never been a fan of the quick. Of the flash of ghost-white lightning before blackness resumes, or the there one second, gone the next nature of youth. He’s never liked the snap of his fingers or a body dropping down before you even notice you’ve pulled the trigger. Only the long, drawn-out process of light leaving eyes, draining through the gap of the pupil, seeping out through the iris. Only in each skin cell curling up individually under the heat of a fire held too close.

Jaemin has always been in it for the long game.

Which is fine by Donghyuck, because he’s in this for life.

**Author's Note:**

> i had to google 'parts of a church' for this 
> 
> thank you so much for reading !! if you enjoyed please leave kudos and comments they make my day so much brighter !!
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/whatisanult)   
>  [cc](https://curiouscat.me/whatisanult)


End file.
